Mercoledi OT – La Maschera del Demonio

The Mask of Satan, Mario Bava's first solo feature after working as an assistant and cinematographer for more than twenty years, is as lurid as you'd expect from the title. It must have been a shock to filmgoers in 1960. In the 60s, you might have watched a butchered version of it called Demon's Mask, Revenge of the Vampire, or House of Fright.

Pure Goth Princess Asa with hounds amidst the ruins of a church.

AIP rescored the music, recut it, and released it in the US as Black Sunday.

Based on professional japester Nikolai Gogol's story "Viy", which he claimed was based on Ukrainian folktales. That turned out to be untrue. As I've said in the past; never trust a writer. Anyway, the film bears as much resemblance to his story as Corman's movies have to Poe's. It owes more to various film versions of Dracula than "Viy" and has more in common with stories of the Wurdulac, the vampires of Slavic folklore, than with stories of enchantment and witchcraft. The look of it was influenced by some of the Hammer Horror films, and it in turn influenced a good number of Gothic movies from AIP, Hammer, and others.

Ceci n'est pas Vlad Tepes

The brass devil's mask, designed and cast by Mario's artist father Eugenio, nailed onto Princess Asa Vajda's (Barbara Steele) face:

Don't worry, she's an adulterous witch. And anyway she recovers, some two centuries later. Sort of. According to one source, the original Italian version implied incest, and the brother with whom she sinned was the priest who condemned her to her fate. 

1960 was a pretty good year for horror films. Some of my all-time favorites were released that year:

Black Sunday – Bava [Tubi, Plex, Roku, Freevee, etc.]

Psycho – Hitchcock [Netflix]

Peeping Tom – Michael Powell [Tubi, Roku Channel, Criterion Channel]

Eyes Without a Face – Georges Franju [Max, Criterion Channel]

The Village of the Damned – Wolf Rilla 

Jigoku – Nobuo Nakagawa [Criterion Channel]

The Housemaid – Kim Ki-young [Criterion Channel]

House of Usher – Roger Corman [Pluto]

The Little Shop of Horrors – Roger Corman [Pluto, Tubi, Freevee, etc.]

Watch one today. You wouldn't want to disappoint Barbara, would you?